Phenomenon card game Exploding Kittens is now an adult animated comedy series, premiering this Friday July 12th on Netflix. This Animation Scoop Q&A is with showrunners and creators Matthew Inman and Shane Kosakowski. (The interview was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: Matt, you co-created the card game and now, about a decade later, it’s a television show. You have had quite the decade.

Matthew Inman: I’ve been a cartoonist for a long time and I always assumed that my comics and books would have become a show rather than a card game because it’s such not a path. Typically you don’t see “Uno: The Movie”, you know what I mean? So yeah, I didn’t expect “Exploding Kittens” to go here, but it did, and I’m happy with how it turned out.

JM: I’ve seen the first couple episodes, and it’s a very fun show. Shane, you have worked on some television comedies, including some animation comedies (“Archer” and “Beavis and Butthead”). But how would you say this experience, because of the card game factor involved, is unique in your television career?

Shane Kosakowski: Yeah, it was different. I was a fan of Matt’s work with The Oatmeal and I love the game. So it was an exciting project to get involved with. Matt had this big premise of God getting put down on Earth in a cat’s body. And so the possibilities were kind of endless. We started from a big giant well of ideas and try to shrink it down and concentrate and focus it. It took a lot of work and Matt and I really like how it turned out. We hope people think it’s funny and they watch all the way through.

JM: Matt, how did you land on GodCat and DevilCat, and the family component, and these being the core aspects of the show?

MI: When I first started to kind of come together with the idea of “let’s make a card game into a show”, honoring the card game… that story and those characters really wasn’t material for a show. The card game is very fun, but every joke is its own joke. They’re all non sequiturs. They’re all blackout gags. So it really didn’t fit. So I tried to approach it from, “What is a show I’d watch, regardless of the card game, that has staying power, that has a good premise, that lets you tell stories that are funny or topical?” And I’ve had this thing in my notebook forever that I never did anything with this idea about a God cat. In my 20s, I dated this girl briefly who had this very strange, large cat that kind of behaved around the house as if he were God, but then would also behave like the Antichrist, on a heel turn. And her parents were super religious, and I heard that they eventually had a priest come over and do an exorcism on the cat. And I didn’t get to see that that day. I would have loved to have seen a cat exorcism, but I didn’t. So I kind of got to channel that wish into a show about a cat and Satan being trapped in cat bodies. It’s also relatable. Anyone who’s owned a cat before… you do live with someone who thinks they’re God, but they’re also the spawn of Satan. And that’s how it came together.

JM: Wow. A cat exorcism. That’s fascinating. And they always say, take what you know and take real life and put it into the entertainment that you make, and you have done that. Shane, I love that a board game is a key component of the first episode, which is a lot of fun. We’re not going to get into spoilers, but having the kind of sort of meta aspect to this, and the family coming together with the board game, that was really cool for episode one.

SK: That was a big part of what we wanted to be in the show and we thought it was ironic too because the dad and the son of the show are both into games, but different varieties of games. And so we thought it was ironic that there should be this kind of bridge and connection between them, but they don’t exactly see it at first. What we talked about from the beginning, when Matt and I started working together, is how the nature of his game physically brings people together. We’re all kind of in virtual worlds and we’re living on our phones, but his game in real life actually does bring people together and families together. We thought that’d be a cool element to include in the show.

JM: It is. And Matt, the look of the show is fun. There’s a high energy to the show as well. What were your goals with both of those components?

MI: My comic, The Oatmeal, has its own style. And oftentimes what I do is I’ve exaggerated certain portions. A lot of my characters are frog eyed, like Homer Simpson… really, really skinny legs for no reason other than I think it looks funny. So going from comic to show, I really tried to preserve that look, that kind of feel. The other thing that we kind of did with some of the episodes is we made it board driven, aka storyboard driven, where the boards drive some of the action. A good example of this is midway through the season, Godcat chugs a bunch of Sriracha, ’cause he’s dared to, and then he runs around the house just erupting Sriracha on everything. That’s a good example of an incredibly well board driven scene. Simultaneously, I’m working with Shane who’s been writing comedy for forever. He kind of taught me the power of the one liner, the ‘if it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage’ philosophy. This joke needs to be a hard joke that lands regardless of the performance, regardless of the actor, regardless of the storyboards. So the show kind of goes board driven, visual comedy, really, really laugh out loud, clever joke [and repeat]. And I feel like we’ve got a really good mix of those in the show.

JM: That makes sense. And Shane, I wanted to ask you too about the comedy, because there’s a lot of one liners that come in, and the timing has to be so key to make that work. Was that challenging for you? Were you comfortable with that? Did you want to take some chances? This is coming out of God’s mouth / GodCat’s mouth.

SK: Yeah, we tried to push the dialogue to be as sharp and funny as possible. A high joke quotient. Hard jokes on every page. Big visual jokes. And then the aspect that we were hoping for, and we got really lucky with, is our actors were all really funny from Tom Ellis to Sasheer Zamata, Mark Proksch, Ally Maki and Kenny Yates. We got really lucky with our group of actors and they brought it all to life and I think it showed up on the screen.

JM: Matt, Tom Ellis leads the way as GodCat. He was “Lucifer” [on that series] and now he’s GodCat and… seems like a challenging vocal performance because it’s a lot of quick dialogue and a lot of sharp dialogue and a lot of interesting dialogue.

MI: He would read a page and every line was usable. He’s also done a lot of comedy. So even though the feeling of him is he’s this stage British actor, he’s super funny. So he could read the line and know where to stress a word or where to pull back to make it funny. So working with Tom was amazing.

JM: And also on your team, Shane, are Greg Daniels and Mike Judge [as executive producers]. Greg Daniels is known for “The Office” and many other comedies. Mike Judge, of course, in the “King of the Hill” and “Beavis and Butthead” worlds. To have them on board, to make this comedy that’s going to have a lot of impact, what does that mean to you?

SK: Their leadership across the board has been wonderful. Bandera, their company, Greg Daniels, Mike Judge and Dustin Davis — incredible collaborators and also just really funny people. They have great taste. When they gave notes, we trusted them and we believed in them… along with our collaborators at Netflix. Everybody over there has been incredible.

JM: One of the fun things in episode two is the tribute to Bruce Willis movies. So for each of you, what is your favorite Bruce Willis movie of all time?

MI: Mine, I don’t know why I’m forgetting the name. I just want to keep saying “Time Cop”, which is not right. And it’s a time travel movie. [Also] “The Fifth Element”. I think every scene of that movie is entertaining. Top to bottom.

SK: There’s an obscure movie that I watched all the time when I was a kid called “Blind Date” with Kim Basinger and Bruce Willis, and it was hysterical. So if you haven’t seen it, please go back and watch it. It’s a great comedy.

JM: Wow. All right. And I’m going to choose “The Sixth Sense”, which I’ve loved ever since I saw it. And the final question for both of you — each of you can answer part of this — What did you discover in making the “Exploding Kittens” show about human behavior and cat behavior?

MI: The dynamic of a cat is very much… cats are like gods in our houses, but they’re also like Satan. And we are at the whims of them.

SH: I would say, human beings do a lot of incredibly stupid things, we’ve discovered over our course of writing this season. Cats do not. They do things instinctually for the best of what they want in the moment, and we should probably be doing the same.

MI: I still can’t remember the name of that time travel movie with Bruce Willis. I don’t know why. It’s not that hard. “Looper”! It’s “Looper”.

JM: With Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt as well. Yes!